Blue Saturday

One of my favourites has a wiki page but the link to the author is red text :/

You remain a wonder, Mark - you have rolled the wheel of the world on a few inches and sown a few minds. And I'm pretty sure you have some divilment left in you.

a reason i am fond of ilx is when i first arrived here 20 odd years ago i discovered readers of my old 80s work at nme and wire who were delighted to encounter me and say nice things abt ancient magazine nonsense -- so yes, i do retain my trust in the old "digging a tunnel under world" aspect of it all. i arrived in a bit of a blue mood then also -- i'd recently lost a job i'd really enjoyed (they slimmed down the subs desk and i landed here while was surfing on the internet at my new job which i hadn't yet come to enjoy)* and also i'd recently wrecked a friendship by falling in LOVE and being a bit of a dick abt it (i was miserable and inevitably made the other person miserable too)… so this is where i re-found my feet and got the idea for my first book (starting a thread abt if… and discussing it w/norman phay among others) and also met the gang that included the person who gave me the connections to set up the birkbeck conference which led to the more recent book (= the pinefox! hullo pinefox!) -- so i *can* be pro-active and effective now and then, contra my claims above

my default when i'm stumped or baffled is to plunge deep back into detail, literally making sure the i's are all dotted and balancing this with cryptic mischief here and elsewhere -- and generally that's fine. but i need to get another couple of larger things out into the world before i really am too old and slow, and one of them is something i've spent decades trying to make happen and a lot of it already exists but somehow it always feels like all the doors are shut against it unless i win the lottery and pay for it that way (which i won't bcz i don't do the lottery)

*i stayed for 14 years in the end and it served me p well, and when i quit it all fell apart quite quickly so i couldn't go back but also OK maybe i was a valued part of it

anyway many thx for all the pleasing and supportive things ppl have said!

i enjoy your posts as much as your writing gigs, mark!

or perhaps a better word is appreciate, given the thread

hi mark yr good not bad

whenever i get the sads i just remember that the world ended on december 21 2012 and it helps tbh

also who knows, i might get to drink tomb juice one day

I'll never be a lawyer, cos I can't pass the bar

that’s a lovely post from mark. i’m tired and a bit drunk and in bed but i am feeling a lot of warmth to everyone here.

Blue, weirdly, is the warmest colour

I happened to come across this interview with Henry Rollins earlier today. About work ethic, what motivates and drives you. And in light of Mark S. recent post I thought I'd share. Sure enough there's a lot here I emphasize with or recognize.
Rollins says he sees writing (books) as 'shipbuilding': "I’m a shipbuilder. I don’t want to sail in them. I want you to sail in them. I’m just happy that they leave the harbor so I can have an empty workplace."

Full thing is here: https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/henry-rollins-on-defining-success/

I’m not a tough guy. I’m not brave. I’m just curious. I’m very well aware of how quickly life goes. You know, Ian [MacKaye] and I both have a lot of dead friends. Everything from suicide to overdose to wrong place, wrong time. There’s a lot to get done. Whether you want to deal with that or not is up to the individual. You just make up your mind, like, “I’m gonna write this book.” How many people are gonna read it? I don’t care. How can I control that? I just want to do the damn thing. That allows me to go unrestrained.
I always have like five books going at once. That anyone will read them, that’d be cool. But I’m not making them to get read; I’m making them to get them out of me. You gotta do something with your life. You can watch TV. You can inhale cocaine. Or you can sit down and write, or sing, or jump up and down, whatever it is. It’s all just choices. So much of this is just committing to the time and the discipline and the agony of creativity—because it turns on you all the time.

another middle of the night blue cos can't be with the people I love always and forever and because I was unnecessarily fractious on ILX which started as a joke but was really just my sore head and I apologise, there's no need, hate it when I do stuff that irritates me when other people do it

Just I don't know the pub is there to not be alone and then you realise wow I was still very alone and everything vanished like a ghost house. The wrong vices, timidly, insanely, boringly, needily not even self-destructive or not. I think I'd avoid myself after a certain point in the evening. Counsellor said something biochemical about the weird feeling of clarity that comes in the middle of the night but I can't remember right now and anyway

yeah it's all biochemical but the existential, the whyness of it. Is there only distance? How did I get raised so needy and unsatisfied by accident?

hate it when I do stuff that irritates me when other people do it

i know you set yr standards in these affairs v high bud, but the above behaviour is basically 'existence' afaict

hi NV and mark, you're good people - all the best. sorry I can't offer any more eloquent or stirring encouragement but there it is

thanks for the Henry Rollins quotes LBI, I had thought I was past the stage of my life where Henry Rollins would be inspiring but nope, that's pretty good there

also I'd love to read more about "something biochemical about the weird feeling of clarity that comes in the middle of the night" but I have no idea what to Google for and it's somehow apt to leave it as a dark, half-understood concept

also, pt.2 - mark s twitter recommendee J4m3s Butl3r posted some Celan y/day and I thought how I should really read* more (some, any) of his stuff and then I read this thread and pomenitul's also great Celan quotation, so - where to start? (there is probably a better thread for this)

* read = buy, perhaps in German, and file unread next to the similarly unread book of Rilke poems my German is very much not good enough for, or perhaps the other clump of unread German books, which coincidentally are next to mark s's book which I also have not read yet, ugh @ me

thanks spacey i am going to go back to the middle of the night thing next time i see the counsellor. something to do with chemicals in the brain subsiding it was.

also lol full disclosure i had always assumed Celan was French because of how his nom de plume looks

aps, I suggest starting with Selections (edited and with an introduction by the great Pierre Joris).

Even if your German is lacking (as mine is, and direly at that), hearing him read his work is a shattering experience imo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhO81S666Ok

I'd also like to point out that his brief and little-known stint as a Romanian-language poet in the early 1940s is no less remarkable and I prefer his work from that period to most of his contemporaries'.

thank you, pom! (and NV too)

I hope to investigate your recommended title via a library soon, and possibly a bilingual edition of poems too, though that's out on loan. Are there good English translations of the early Romanian work?

the aforementioned James B tweet included a link to Celan reading Todesfuge, and, yes, remarkable, shattering.

(pom's link has English subtitles if you turn CC on and that one ^ does not, alas, but the tweet thread links to the text of a couple of English translations)

My pleasure! Selections features one of the early Romanian poems – a Surrealistic pastiche of sorts, but hardly the piece I would have picked to represent that facet of his work. Reportedly, there's a 2003 volume that collects them all in English, but I have no idea what those translations are worth.

a low so low I don't even want to begin to describe it. I feel like I've been nothing but a burden, a user, a disappointment all my life. perfectly self-absorbed child, even this fucking thread is a manifestation of that.

I don't have a melodramatic solution to it. I know reality is never as extreme as I'm feeling it, or at least I know that's what I'd tell somebody else. But that doesn't mean those feelings can't be broadly true, doesn't mean "depression" can't be a selfish self-dramatising response to selfishness.

I'm lying here feeling like the end of the world with a little inner voice telling myself (or the outside world, I don't know) that recognition is part of recovery. But the sheer amount of work to climb out of here, to change myself, to have a viable future for anybody - it feels insurmountable, or it feels like I'm buried under it.

so I lie here passive and create a wilderness and call it self-care.

How are you doing now NV?

I have had a bad enough week with mine, but on top of that I’m very tired (I think I’m coming down) so I’m not really dwelling on it. The two are possibly interrelated as well - I am always very tired after a bad spell of it. Having said that all my sinuses seem to be going off at once, so. Probably shouldn’t be reading The Stand atm!

I don't know if people who haven't experienced it realise how physical mental health stuff can be sometimes.

I had a good session with my counselor yesterday. Dunno if it was "productive" but it was grown-up and I felt understood and I feel like I can see the beginnings of a possible path forward.

So after I went to the pub and well I *probably* shouldn't have but I mostly enjoyed it and it was mostly therapeutic but I should probably not do the buzzer in the pub quiz after an all dayer.

And now I'm a bit hungover and my brain if not yet my stomach is hungry and I can't be bothered to put outside clothes on or cook anything but I really want sweeties and I shouldn't spend Just Eat money so maybe I'll sneak up behind myself and go out before I realise what I'm doing.

And the psychic devastation is well down from Monday but I really really have to do stuff and I might be kidding myself about my own capacity to do stuff, we'll see, it's the weekend anyway even if I am a layabout, I will try to try on Monday.

Oh and I don't think my daughter's talking to me at the moment but hopefully that will pass.

Well I’m glad you’re getting something from therapy! And yeah, get something to eat like. I just remembered I have black pudding at home which I can eat tomorrow, which is good cos my iron could always do with a boosting.

Otm re physical symptoms of MH, I wish I had known this 20 years ago because things would have made so much more sense.

Are you doing anything this weekend?

Probably lying around the house playing video games but I've gone out for walks twice this week and enjoyed it, I should probably make the effort if the weather's not lousy.

Storm blowing outside, it was nice listening to the rain last night. Since I've been on the effexor I've had a lot of vivid dreams, which is a mixed blessing. And this morning was the return of a long lost frenemy, the dream of being loved and in love, like being sixteen again.

The worst of that being the real aching loss when you wake up and it's not real and you're alone and old. And I don't have getting drunk money and the storm is blowing outside and the blue is such a mirror image of actual joy that you treasure it anyway because.

I was out in that storm and got drenched to the bone in two minutes, that wasn't rain it was like a wall of water landing on me.

got a nice little soundclash between loud cracks of thunder, howling wind and the colin stetson color out of space soundtrack. please don't fail me national grid, i'm enjoying this!

Pretty windy here, haven’t been out in it. The kittens aren’t fans of it.

<3 to all

fabulous weather noises; should go out as I barely left the house y/day and 2 days without much fresh air or exercise or variation in real not-on-screen things to look at will not be good for my mental health throughout the week, but don't want to be out in this

cat was meeping constantly, possibly because of the wind/rain noises but perhaps just because, but has now settled down on her cat tree to glare at everyone and fall asleep (cat otm)

before previous big storm warnings i've always taken in the various flowerpots and herb-pots and little trees on my window sill, in case they blow off. This time I left it too late -- tho London is threatening 30mph rather than 80mph so fingers x-ed it will be OK. The tree is "safely" tied, and anyway no one will be out and about in the garden below to be brained by anything

actually i might take this opp to dig up all the invasive chickweed and let it blow free (and away) lol

Not much signs of any storm here, that's London for you, nothing interesting ever happens weatherwise.

... God heard me, thunder! Yasssssss!

... and now the wind shaking the trees. It's like "Night of the Demon" all of a sudden.

i was just listening to the commentator at Millwall, sounds like they're not short of weather right now

Bit of my fence has blown down, that's fun

I am in Corbynland, we are sheltered from storms by our preening self-righteousness.

Blew Sunday

It’s taken me from 11.15am to get from Bath to the outskirts of London, and I’m still approaching Paddington now. But the unusual weather, Blitz spirit and trusting to fate nature of the journey have been quite entertaining in their way.

LOL, the storm has definitely reached Islington.

xp ironic that it's slowed you down heading east, apparently a passenger jet broke the subsonic transatlantic record today thanks to the storm

I was hoping it would reach France in time to cancel the Six Nations match so I could sit in the pub quietly without the advertised big screen blaring and tossers in rugby shirts elbowing me at the bar - match went ahead but it did stop anyone else turning up except one other couple who also weren't watching, so the sound was thankfully on mute and no injuries were sustained

(apologies to those of you who actually enjoy that stuff)

some hefty lower branches of the tree out front have come down, hope the council won't take this as an excuse to cut the whole thing down, they already cut down a row of mature trees opposite

Fence tipped over here too, and the recycling bins with it. One for the Real England thread? Or so I like to picture it.

those Hebden Bridge pics/vids from today are grim watching. Glad I live on top of a huge mountain, well sort of a hill but locals call it a mountain.

^^ Calder Valley suffers every single time. It was really bad in Mytholmroyd, too.

In Todmorden they were using ww2 air raid sirens as a flood warning!

I need to change the litter trays and I am not looking forward to it!